I was wondering if anyone else had any questions they always asked the interviewer in the “we’ll give you five minutes at the end to ask us questions” bit in interviews.
Personally I always ask what the staff turnover rate is. Mainly because in my first dev job I was one of four people who started on the same day. One of the other guys left after two days, I left after six weeks, and another guy left after two months.
Another I’ll be asking after my current job is if they have a mainframe. I’ve now worked at three companies with mainframes and they all were old corporations where they were outsourcing loads of stuff to unhelpful companies (often IBM) which generally meant lots of headaches.
Over here, it’s customary that some HR rep tells you most of that. There usually is a handbook with all the rules, so they know it by heart.
A question I find important is financial stability and outlook. How is the company doing? How’s the market? What’s the prognosis for staying afloat? Are they sure it will survive 1 year? 2 years? 5 years? These questions have different answers for different stages: a startup’s outlook can be determined by the need for VC capital, an established small-to-medium sized company depends on the state of the economy, so buffers are important.
Even if HR is supposed to answer that I’d still ask the people doing the work. Often HR have a rose tinted view of things compared to the reality that the developers see. I remember having an exit interview where I told HR how bad things really were and they just refused to believe that it was real because no one had told them.
As for financial stability, I’d rather look at things like crunchbase or some finance website just to find the details. I’ve found a lot of people working for a company will put a positive spin on everything because they’ll often be trying to convince themselves they’ve made a good choice to remain at the company. Essentially, it’s a sunk cost fallacy.